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Saturday, May 2, 2015

Ada Fetters: Memoir on Spirituality

The Cult Peripheral

I am not the kind of person who seeks out spiritual
enlightenment. As an introverted thinker I would rather contemplate theories
and computer programs.

Yet I was in a cult for a brief while. No, I was not
roped in through a recruitment program or “love bombing” or other sly but
effective tactics that cults employ. A
friend of mine, Joel, had been invited to “a new church” but did not want to go
alone. Joel was experiencing a spiritual re-awakening at the time and wanted to
enlighten others with his rather nice interpretation that the Golden Rule is
paramount. "God wants us to be kind to one another.”

I provided a listening ear for my friend's frustration
but was non-committal about the disposition of a higher power.

“Agnostic or not," Joel said, "you have to
admit that if everyone would just ‘do unto others’ instead of being selfish,
the world would be a better place."

Joel’s old church was less than enthusiastic about this
minimalist doctrine—Cornerstone had seventy-odd years of their own tradition
and were not about to revise it now—so he was willing to try this new Wednesday
night Bible study group.

The group marketed itself as non-denominational. They
didn’t even have a formal name. Joel figured they would be more receptive to
his idea about the Golden Rule. However, he did not want to go alone to this
new Bible study group and so he talked me, his only friend not already
committed to a church, into coming along. However, he was without a familiar
face most of the time anyway: as soon as we entered the big old house set back
in a stand of huge cedars, we were told that the men and the women studied
separately. The men stayed downstairs in the living room, while the women were
relegated to the periphery of the spare room upstairs.

I followed them upstairs, feeling like a bottle of
absinthe in a bed of tulips: I was in my grunge phase, wearing a man’s plaid
shirt too big for me and smudged eyeliner. They held their ankle-length skirts
up from underfoot as they climbed the staircase. The ceiling light in the spare
bedroom revealed faces innocent of makeup. The walls had been painted so
recently that the room still smelled of it, and of the resinous cedar trees
outside because the window was open to let out the paint fumes. There were
indentations in the carpet where a bed, a rocking chair and a dresser had been,
but no furniture had been moved back in after the painting: instead there was a
circle of folding chairs.

After the business of selecting chairs, none of the women
in the group seemed to know what to do. No one introduced themselves. There was
silence, then awkward small talk as each woman glanced at her neighbors to see
what they were doing. The problem with relegation to the periphery was that no
one wanted to take the position of leadership. A few of them talked about the
men in their lives. The pastor’s daughter took this opportunity to inform us
that one of the rules of this particular sect was that a woman has to get the
approval of nearly all the men in her life (“Your father, brothers and
grandfather, if there is one”) before marriage. She gave us a shiny smile. “So
when I get married, I know he’ll be the one.”

A word: when I get bored, I say whatever comes into my head.
It is a kind of game. If something interesting happens, I win. As a teenager at
the zoo, my younger brother and I were told that there would be a raptor event,
in which we’d get to see eagles and falcons. I murmured to my brother, “There
is also a rapture event, in which all the animals ascend into heaven.” To me it
was an amusing play on words but it struck him as really funny: our parents did
not understand why he laughed so hard he snorted cola from his nose, especially
since he had no breath to explain. I presented an expression of wide-eyed
innocence to our parents.

The conversation had moved on. A few of the other women
were talking about fireworks displays they had seen for Fourth of July. One
woman said that in her town they’d let the big fireworks off from a hill just
above the town. They exploded so low that roofs sometimes caught on fire.

I used my sneakers to push myself perfectly upright in my
folding chair. “Back in my day,” I announced from my ancient age of twenty, “We
only had black-and-white fireworks.”

Their heads swiveled toward me. Most of them nodded,
their faces open, receptive. One woman, dark-haired, said carefully, “But…
black fireworks… you couldn’t see them at night.”

“That’s why switched to colored ones,” I answered.

“Ohh. That’s right.”

I was stunned into silence. No, that’s not right, I
wanted to say. You’re supposed to tell me I’m being a smartass and a joker.
Ada.exe stopped working and had to shut down. There was no clock in the room,
so it was difficult to tell how much time had passed until one of the men
knocked at the door and told us to come downstairs.

As Joel and I milled around for after-study chit-chat, a
male member of the church pulled me aside and informed me sotto voce that I
should not say "such things" to the women because if they found that
they’d believed a falsehood, that would damage their willingness to believe
what was true. "It will damage credibility."

On our way back to the main street, as we passed beneath
the resinous cedars, Joel said that he would not need me to provide support for
Bible study next week. He would not be returning.

“Oh?”

To Joel's disappointment, their convictions were already
entrenched. He had been unable to find an audience for the simplicity of Golden
Rule, and even if he had, it would be an empty victory: he'd found out that the
men’s Bible study was peripheral to the main church. It was only led by the
pastor’s son. “...Who, by the way, told me you and I could never come back or
speak with its members again,” Joel sighed.

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